Holy Shit, You’ve Got Cancer

I’ve been reading it and re-reading it since I found it a few weeks ago via the Ticking Off Breast Cancer website (thanks, Sara!). Elana Miller is this lady’s name and she is a psychiatrist based in Los Angeles in the United States. In December of 2013 she was diagnosed with Stage IV Acute Lymphoblastic Lymphoma, and she survived. The article she wrote shortly after her cancer diagnosis reached millions of people and was translated into French, German, Italian and Japanese. She wrote about her experience with cancer and path to healing as it was happening, as honestly when it was hopeful as when it was sad.

Elana is doing well now and is back to work with a small private psychiatry practice in LA. You can find her at her website, Zen Psychiatry, where she also has a blog which you can subscribe to.

We’d love to know what you think of Elana’s Guide and if you find it helpful, please do let us know in the comments below. We think it’s fantastic and we’re still thinking about it every day. We love her rawness and authenticity and profound belief in the resilience of the human spirit.

Here is a little piece of her writing…

I am here, and my feet are planted firmly on this earth. I am alive—I am so wildly alive. I feel each beat of my heart, I sense every sound, the melody of voices so distant you can barely hear them, the gentle hum of traffic outside my window. In the morning it smells of bitter coffee, in the evening of lavender soap. I see every brilliant ray of light, I feel the soft warmth on my skin. The sun glows down on me as if it comes from heaven.

My name is Holly.
I was diagnosed with breast cancer in December 2016 at age 32. Happy Magazine is the resource I longed for when I was going through my own treatment - the tool to show me how you can still be happy, even with cancer. I hope you love it as much as I do and that you keep coming back to see what’s new every day.